Towns urged to have more election volunteers Nov. 8
Oct. 29—CONCORD — The state's top election official is urging city and town clerks in communities with voting machines to have enough volunteers on election night Nov. 8 to deal with an "organized effort" by some voters to require their ballots be hand-counted.
Secretary of State David Scanlan said he does not believe this will result in significant delays to reporting the count, as long as clerks are prepared to deal with it.
"Right now I am feeling pretty confident we are going to have a smooth election," Scanlan said during an interview.
"I have not heard anything that would lead me to think differently, but you have to be prepared for what might happen, and we are."
During the Sept. 13 primary, a flood of write-in votes overwhelmed some town clerks.
In Derry, 1,200 voters — nearly 29% — cast write-in ballots.
This meant a small team of eight volunteers worked until 3 a.m. after the polls closed to count all those write-ins and finish the multiple reports required of all election officials.
"We've got another 32 signed up to work, and the Town Council has gratefully approved spending the money to pay them," said Town Clerk Tina Guilford. "We'll be ready."
Terese Grinnell, an anti-vaccine mandate activist with We The People, said her group advised skeptical voters they should write in the names of their candidates even if they appeared on the ballot, which would force their ballot to be counted by hand.
"We told people who didn't trust the machines that this was one way to assure them their ballots were counted accurately," Grinnell said.
"This wasn't some conspiracy to try and delay the count. We were trying to get as many people to participate in this election, and this was one option for them."
Scanlan said it "was an organized effort to get voters to do that, mark their ballots in a way that they have to be hand-counted."
More than 100 towns in the state use hand-counted ballots, but nearly 90% of residents live in towns that use AccuVote, the only electronic ballot counting machines allowed in New Hampshire.
The aging machines are no longer being manufactured, and the Ballot Law Commission already has approved rules for the cities and towns to acquire and use newer technology in future elections.
Premature numbers
Scanlan said he has urged local election officials not to publicly release results based on the summary tape that comes out of those voting machines.
"In the past some moderators have put up the results of the tapes when they are ready. It doesn't sink in to people viewing them that reconciliation will change those numbers," Scanlan said.
The machine tape summary does not include totals for write-in votes.
It also doesn't include ballots that get kicked into a side pocket of the counting machine because the voter chose too many candidates in at least one contest, he said.
In some large towns, waiting to make this report of the total vote means results will not be reported until midnight, he said.
But Marylyn Todd of Nashua, a leader in the N.H. Voter Integrity Group that has questioned the reliability of machine voting, condemned withholding the tape information.
"That's the most insane thing I have ever heard. If there is no transparency, how are you going to have any trust in the outcome?" Todd said.
"Why would you hide something from the public?"
Derry's Guilford defended the practice, recalling in the 2018 midterm election that a news service outlet obtained the tape from one of three polling places and reported it as the town's total vote.
Derry is using a single polling place this year.
"It takes time to go through all the steps but it's worth waiting to get a result everyone can rely upon," Guilford said.
Todd, a former bank auditor, rejected the logic.
"If we did a bank audit and didn't release any information prior to reconciliation, I would have been fired," Todd said.
Scanlan said election monitors won't be needed again at polls in Bedford, Windham and one ward in Laconia — communities where there were ballot irregularities in the 2020 campaign.
Scanlan assigned monitors to watch those polls in last September's primary.
"The primary goal was to make sure the same mistakes were not repeated," Scanlan said.
